A lof of the vets tried to justify, rationalize for all the death and dying. But, there really is no explanation to it. Figuring it out is a waste of time. It's just another war that's started by old men and fought by young boys.

A Vietnam war veteran on the irrationality of war (from NYT, 15 May 2010 edition).

The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalist and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of executioners.

From the late Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.

I think being on the side of the suffering is many times underestimated. People think it doesn't matter what they do, simply because of the sheer hugeness of the dark side. I believe the opposite. What you think, what you say and do matters much more than you anticipate; and when organized, no force is big enough to stop your rightful initiative.

[...] when I began writing, I thought that everything should be defined by the writer. For example, to say "the moon" was strictly forbidden; that one had to find an adjective, an epithet for the moon. (Of course, I'm simplifying things. I know it because many times I have written la luna, but this is a kind of symbol of what I was doing.) Well, I thought everything had to be defined and that no common turns of phrase should be used. I would never have said, So-and-so came in and sat down, because that was far too simple and far too easy. I thought I had to find out some fancy way of saying it. Now I find out that those things are generally annoyances to the reader. But I think the whole root of the matter lies in the fact that when a writer is young he feels somewhat that what he is going to say is rather silly or obvious or commonplace, and then he tries to hide it under baroque ornament, under words taken from the seventeenth-century writers; or, if not, and he sets out to be modern, then he does the contrary: he's inventing words all the time, or alluding to airplanes, railway trains, or the telegraph and telephone because he's doing his best to be modern.

Jorge Luis Borges, The Paris Review. Issue 40, 1967.
Taken from "The Paris Review Interviews, vol. I".

I can identify with this feeling. I believe it is similar when one is a novice in programming, in photography or any other creative stuff. I remember when I first built my website, or coded my first few homeworks. There was always some flashy things, clever tricks (or so I thought) here and there. I wanted to surprise the "other" somehow, and it really didn't matter to me how that would be. It's the same in photography, I know it because I think I'm still living my novice period there.

Here's to simplicity and quality!

Interviewer

Finally, a fundamental question: As a creative writer what do you think is the function of your art? Why a representation of fact, rather than fact itself?

Hemingway

Why be puzzled by that? From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?

From The Paris Review, Issue 18, 1958. Taken from the Paris Review Interviews Vol I, Picador, 2006.